1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to an information technology (IT) infrastructure of an enterprise, and specifically, an IT infrastructure that enables a zero latency enterprise (ZLE). The present invention enables the enterprise to integrate its services, applications and data in real time, hence the ZLE.
2. Background Art
Information technology (IT) allows valuable information to be distributed across organizations to groups of information consumers including remote employees, business partners and customers. However, organizations have large amounts of information located on disparate systems and platforms. For maintaining the desired comprehensive view of their operations, organizations need to integrate theirs systems. Then again, independent configuration for disparate industry standards and technologies makes systems integration requirements difficult to meet. Moreover, as the various business applications have diverse features and are tailored to suit the requirements of a particular domain, their integration requirements may be also difficult to meet. For example, there are significant integration requirements to make it work when integrating a customer relationship management (CRM) application to an existing system with other applications such as SAP's enterprise resource planning (ERP) software package, as the CRM is uniquely tailored to the customer care domain.
Notwithstanding, when addressing their critical information needs, organizations often resort to new best-of-the-breed applications (or solutions). To leverage their existing applications, organizations integrate their legacy applications with the new solutions, a practice known as enterprise application integration (EAI). To this end, software vendors have responded by building tools, known as EAI products, alas different tools by different vendors, to automate the integration process.
Deficiencies in integration and data sharing are indeed a difficult problem of IT environments for any enterprise. The inability of organizations to operate as one-organ, rather than separate parts, creates a challenge in information exchange and electronic commerce and results in economic inefficiencies.
With conventional solutions, organizations have been using some form of the EAI platform to integrate their application. And they have been using a different platform for integrating their data into data warehouses. Data warehouses integrate data across an organization for reporting and data mining using business intelligence tools like SAS Institute tools.
The problems with these schemes are that there is no real-time connection and interaction between the EAI and data warehousing. Moreover, with relatively static data warehouses the data warehousing cloud is used for analysis but could not participate in the current transaction or events that are happening in the organization in real time. The organization still will end up with two disjointed infrastructures that cannot leverage each other in real-time (See: FIG. 1). Accordingly the present invention addresses these and related issues.